The firm
GIVE Consultancy Limited was founded in 2019 to deliver senior strategic advisory of the kind we wanted to commission ourselves: plain, accountable, partnership-first. We work with founders, scale-ups, SMEs, established businesses, non-profits and public-sector bodies, across six service lines: Strategy, Marketing, Legal & Regulatory, HR & People, Market Research, and Operations.
We are part of the GIVE Network, alongside our sister firm GIVE Analytics (financial modelling and analytics) and the GIVE Foundation (the network's charitable arm).
We choose not to run a junior practice. The firm is deliberately small and senior-led: a single principal today, with every engagement run personally from the senior level. We choose not to chase scale. We choose not to take referral fees. We choose not to over-promise. These are deliberate constraints, and they keep the work honest.
Mission
To help businesses and organisations make the consequential decisions in front of them with clearer framing, better evidence, and senior judgement they can defend. We work across six disciplines and pick up engagements where the buyer wants a sharper outside read, fast.
Corporate mandate
1. Client success
The success and growth of our clients is the headline metric. We design every engagement around a clear, named outcome and we measure ourselves against it.
2. Excellence and innovation
We treat advisory as a discipline, not a slogan. We invest in our own learning, keep up with the tooling that genuinely changes the work, and ignore the tooling that does not.
3. Ethical practice
Integrity is the constraint that does not flex. We are explicit about conflicts, we decline work we are not the right firm for, and we are happy to walk away from engagements where the right answer is one the client does not want to hear.
4. Quiet contribution
A portion of every year's profits goes back through the GIVE Foundation. We don't lead with it and we don't market on it; we mention it here because some clients ask, and it is a real thing about how the firm is set up. If you want to know more, ask us.
Who we are
Principal
David Hickson
Principal Consultant & Founding Director
David Hickson founded GIVE Consultancy to deliver senior-led strategic advisory of the kind he wanted to commission himself: plain, accountable, partnership-first.
He brings deep experience in advanced financial modelling, investment analysis and strategic advisory, with a technical background spanning Excel, Python, SQL and production software engineering. His advisory practice has operated at board and director level across a broad range of engagements, advising investment funds, sovereign wealth funds, corporations and government bodies across the UK, MENA and Asia-Pacific.
David also founded the GIVE Foundation, the charitable entity through which GIVE Consultancy and GIVE Analytics each donate 10% of annual profits to causes making a measurable difference.
The wider network
GIVE Consultancy sits alongside GIVE Analytics (financial modelling and analytics) and the GIVE Foundation (the network's charitable arm). The Analytics tie matters operationally: it is where deep modelling, viability and capital-raising work gets done when an engagement needs it.
The Foundation is something we are quietly proud of; we don't make a marketing piece of it. If you want to know how it works or which causes it currently supports, ask us in conversation.
Let's talk
30-minute conversation. Free. Confidential. No sales process. We respond within one working day.